Serial crystallography at X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) and synchrotron facilities has experienced tremendous progress in recent times enabling novel scientific investigations into macromolecular structures and molecular processes. However, these experiments generate a significant amount of data posing computational challenges in data reduction and real-time feedback. Bragg peak finding algorithm is used to identify useful images and also provide real-time feedback about hit-rate and resolution. Shot-to-shot intensity fluctuations and strong background scattering from buffer solution, injection nozzle and other shielding materials make this a time-consuming optimization problem. Here, we present PeakNet, an autonomous Bragg peak finder that utilizes deep neural networks. The development of this system 1) eliminates the need for manual algorithm parameter tuning, 2) reduces false-positive peaks by adjusting to shot-to-shot variations in strong background scattering in real-time, 3) eliminates the laborious task of manually creating bad pixel masks and the need to store these masks per event since these can be regenerated on demand. PeakNet also exhibits exceptional runtime efficiency, processing a 1920-by-1920 pixel image around 90 ms on an NVIDIA 1080 Ti GPU, with the potential for further enhancements through parallelized analysis or GPU stream processing. PeakNet is well-suited for expert-level real-time serial crystallography data analysis at high data rates.

Ever since the discovery of x-rays, considerable breakthroughs have been made using them as a probe of matter, from testing models of the atom to solving the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Over the last few decades with the proliferation of synchrotron x-ray sources around the world, the application to many scientific fields has progressed tremendously and allowed studies of complicated structures and phenomena like protein dynamics and crystallography [1, 2], electronic structures of strongly correlated materials [3, 4], and a wide variety of elementary excitations [5, 6]. With the the development of the next generation of light sources, especially the x-ray free electron lasers (X-FEL) [7, 8], not only have discoveries accelerated, but completely novel techniques have been developed and new fields of science have emerged, such as laboratory astrophysics [9, 10, 11, 12] and single particle diffractive imaging [13, 14, 15]. Among these emerging techniques brought by X-FELs, the development of x-ray photon fluctuation spectroscopy (XPFS) holds particular relevance for condensed matter and material physics [16]. XPFS is a unique and powerful approach that opens up numerous opportunities to probe ultrafast dynamics of timescales corresponding to the µeV to meV-energy level. As the high-level coherence of the x-ray beam encodes subtle changes in the system at these timescales, XPFS is capable of investigating fluctuations of elementary excitations, such as that of the spin [17]. The fluctuation spectra collected using this method can be directly related back to correlation functions derived from Hamiltonians [18, 19], yielding invaluable experimental insights for theoretical developments and deeper understandings of the underlying physics.

With X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs), it is possible to determine the three-dimensional structure of noncrystalline nanoscale particles using X-ray single-particle imaging (SPI) techniques at room temperature. Classifying SPI scattering patterns, or "speckles", to extract single hits that are needed for real-time vetoing and three-dimensional reconstruction poses a challenge for high data rate facilities like European XFEL and LCLS-II-HE. Here, we introduce SpeckleNN, a unified embedding model for real-time speckle pattern classification with limited labeled examples that can scale linearly with dataset size. Trained with twin neural networks, SpeckleNN maps speckle patterns to a unified embedding vector space, where similarity is measured by Euclidean distance. We highlight its few-shot classification capability on new never-seen samples and its robust performance despite only tens of labels per classification category even in the presence of substantial missing detector areas. Without the need for excessive manual labeling or even a full detector image, our classification method offers a great solution for real-time high-throughput SPI experiments.